Marianne Jean-Baptiste

In the wake of a career-ending scandal, disgraced lawyer Lawson Russell moves to Key West, where he befriends aging novelist Christopher Marlowe. After letting Russell borrow his latest manuscript, Marlowe dies of a heart attack. When Russell publishes the dead man's manuscript under his own name, he makes the best-seller list—and unwittingly becomes the prime suspect in the investigation of a grisly multiple homicide.

After her adoptive mother dies, Hortense, a successful black optometrist, seeks out her birth mother. She's shocked when her research leads her to Cynthia, a working class white woman.